Your Best People Are Working Inside Something You Built - The SPRIITE Series/Article 1 of 9

An owner I was working with told me his people were good but his company was stuck. I asked him how he would rate the environment he had built for those good people to work inside. He said pretty good, probably. Most owners say some version of that, and most of them mean it.

So I gave him seven things to score, one to five, with a sentence of evidence beside each. Then I asked his leadership team to score the same seven, separately, without seeing his answers. He came back with an average a little above four. His team came back with an average just under three, and on two of the seven, the gap between his score and theirs was more than a full point.

He was working from a picture of his company that nobody else in the building shared.

The seven conditions

I laid these out as seven questions in an earlier article, on auditing the environment before you judge the people.

This series turns those questions into seven scores, which is a different and more useful instrument. I use an acronym for them, SPRIITE, spelled S-P-R-I-I-T-E. The two I's are Information and Innovation, and they fail in completely different ways.

Structure covers how the company is arranged to do work: clear ownership of outcomes, clear decision rights, teams pointed at the same goals, and accountability that starts and stops somewhere specific.

Process covers the methods behind the work that matters. Whether they exist in a usable form, whether they are efficient, whether work lands with the right people, and whether they actually reduce errors.

Resources cover what you have handed people to do the job: tools, technology, budget, staffing, expertise, and hours.

Information covers the quality and the frequency of what people are told. Financial and operating reporting, KPIs, plans, and changes in direction, delivered accurately and while there is still time to act.

Innovation covers whether the company can find novel solutions and adapt, which includes new offerings and also the smaller daily version, where somebody close to the work sees a better way and has a path to be heard.

Training covers whether people have been prepared for the job they are doing today. Technical skill, and also the leadership, communication, and financial skills the job actually demands.

Engagement covers ownership, purpose, and belonging. Whether people give you more than the minimum, and whether your read on that is honest rather than hopeful.

None of these are novel. Every experienced leader would recognize all seven. What is uncommon is checking all seven, on purpose, at the same time, with numbers attached.

Why a score beats an opinion

Everyone in your company already has an opinion about the environment. The opinions live in separate heads, they never get compared, and the loudest one usually wins by default. A score does three things an opinion cannot.

It forces specificity. A one to five scale with a sentence of evidence beside it makes people say what they actually mean. "Our processes are fine" becomes "we scored process a two because the three steps that determine whether an order ships on time have never been written down anywhere."

It exposes the gaps. The number that matters most in this exercise is rarely the score itself. It is the distance between what leadership scored and what the team scored on the same condition. That distance is a measurement of how well you currently see your own company, and it is usually the most useful thing the assessment produces in the first hour.

And it gives you a baseline to move. A condition scored at 2.4 last January and 3.6 this January is progress you can point to in a room full of people who watched it happen. Without the first number, the second one is just a claim.

Two thresholds are worth holding in mind as you score. A condition below 3.2 is a real execution risk for anything that depends on it. A condition above 3.7 is a strength you can build on. The band in between is the ordinary middle, where most companies sit on most conditions.

I run this with clients as a scored assessment, leaders and their teams completing it independently, because the independence is where the value is. Do it as a group discussion and the scores drift toward whatever the most senior person in the room said first.

What the pattern usually shows

When I look at a completed assessment, I am looking at the pattern before any individual number. Three things show up often enough to be worth naming in advance.

In my experience, two or three conditions usually explain most of what leadership is frustrated about. Not all seven, and rarely one. In the case that first made this vivid for me, a department everyone had written off turned out to be sitting on unclear ownership, information that arrived two days late, and no training since onboarding. Those three together produced almost every symptom in the thick file on that department.

Engagement is often a result more than a separate problem of its own. It tends to score low when the first six score low, and companies that respond by buying an engagement program are frequently treating the number instead of what produced it. The engagement article, eighth in this series, covers how to read that score properly.

And the highest scores are worth as much attention as the lowest. A condition above 3.7 raises the odds on any initiative that leans on it. Knowing which of the seven you can build on changes what you should attempt this year, and it is the half of the assessment owners most often skip.

Where this series goes

The articles that follow take each of the seven conditions in turn. What it means in practice, how it fails, what the failure tends to cost, and how to score your own company honestly against it. The last article covers what to do with the scores once you have them, which is the part most assessments never get to.

If you want to start before the series does, take the seven names above, score your own company one to five with a sentence of evidence for each, and then have your leadership team do the same without seeing your answers. Set a meeting to compare. The conversation that follows is worth more than the scores.

Everything in this series comes from companies I ran, companies that brought me in to help, and years of sitting with other owners while they worked on the same problems. The stories are blended enough that no single company is on display. If you want another set of eyes on the assessment, my door is open.